Can I publish libraries of Vulkan byte code callable from GLSL?

Vulkan
1

Hi

The title says it all really - I’d like to publish the equivalent of a ‘DLL for OpenGL’ (of functions in GLSL, rather than shaders).

Thanks

2

What is “Vulkan byte code”? Are you talking about SPIR-V? What would prevent you from distributing some SPIR-V file?

3

Yes, SPIR-V. Thats my question … how can you invoke the functions in a SPIR-V file from a GLSL shader?

4

Only if you fork a GLSL compiler and modify it so that it could embed external SPIR-V blobs. Not sure what is the point, since GPUs are literally incapable of running complex programs that would actually require such DLLs.

5

you would need to link the lib byte code with the shader bytecode before you give the result of the linking to vulkan

6

GPUs are literally capable of running any program at all. For a start, OpenCL (which compiles to SPIR-V) is used to run some of the most complex mathematical algorithms ever devised.

7

but there are fundamental limitations of what it can do.

Especially if you want to keep performance

8

And how would I achieve that?

9

there are import/export decorators for functions in spir-v, the lib would export a bunch of functions, the user code would import them and the linker would combine them and put everything in a single file.

10

For a hacky solution, SPIRV-Cross can make GLSL from SPIR-V. Then glslangValidator can link multiple GLSLs together.